Shadow
by dogstar-ebony
Summary: Just because someone is dead does not mean they are forgotten. And sometimes, in the dead of night, ghosts come back to haunt us.....Sirius's nightmares in Azkaban.


I know it is them.

I don't need to study that unruly crop of black tangles, like singed steel wool to recognize the wiry, sculpted face beneath it.

I don't need to see the yellow-flecked hazel of his eyes as they stare intently from beneath arched eyebrows.

I don't need to watch the way his muscles pull taut along the seam of his jaw as he grins that wolfish smile of his.

I have seen him a thousand times before, a million. I've heard his voice encrusted with sleep and heightened with joy; I've seen his face alight with excitement and shadowed by despair; I've seen those slim, broom-calloused hands wrapped in his hair in worry and pulling through the red-gold strands of hers.

The same way I know it is her standing before me now.

She is smiling that easy smile of hers, the one that lights up the darkest rooms, the one that melts James as easily as butter in the sun, acquitting her of any crime her blameless hands could shape.

They laugh now, easy smiles resplendent on tanned faces, love-polished eyes alight with happiness as they lean toward one another, like two halves of a wishbone, pure and smooth and clear.

I see it happening before I can prevent it.

Behind them I see the shadow. It moves closer this time, and still they smile on, unknowing, unafraid. They are still young enough to believe in the fairy tales their loving parents read to them as children; still naïve enough to believe with a childlike tenacity that the Bad Men cannot hurt them so long as they are together.

I know differently. I have seen it before. And I am afraid now, cringing as the sledgehammer of the truth slams into my skull; I will have to see it again.

The shadow swoops closer, a trail of the macabre in its wake. Trees long-grown from their sapling state emit dull shrieks as they are rent in two; the screams of sleek fat crows die in their strangled throats; the desperate pleas of a woman in pain slash at the air, and still the shadow prowls on. It is coming closer and closer, and I watch, horror-struck, as once again it claims my friends.

They curve slowly, unnaturally, the arch of her back twisting oddly, and the fleshy centre of the wishbone is pulled awkwardly, the smiles unfading, uniform upon their unseeing faces. A fissure clefts the bone, hair thin, but I can see that it will be their undoing. It fractures, the split running along the seam of them, cleaving their hearts, clawing at their souls, and still they seem oblivious. A shrill, high laugh punctuates the air viciously and all the breath is sucked from my lungs as I see what my sequinned eyes failed to before, refused to.

The smiles are rotting on their faces, rancid flesh sliding, oozing, down skin mottled grey with the ethereal pallor of death. The light behind their eyes has been cut short and their sockets now hold white-filmed orbs, pupil-less, encrusted by yellow and pink, sunken deep into waxy shadows. They throw back skeletal heads, laughing, and I can see the cinder blackness of their ghostly tongues as they dance eerily among the browning headstones of their teeth, and their laughter, so full of light and hope, is heavy with solemnity, with regret. A potent scent launches a spiteful attack upon my nostrils, a sweetly rotten black odour, acidic in its pungency, clawing at my moist flesh, making me want to tear at my face if only to be free of it.

And a scream, a terrible, bloodcurdling scream fills my ears, a cry of agony wrenched from the bowels of some hellish creature.

I wake up, drowned with sweat, my ears ringing. I am in utter darkness. All around me the prison slowly fills with a buzzing sound, as though of angry bees, as the inmates voice their various complaints.

It is a long time before I realise that the scream came from the pit of my own breast.

Before the recollection that my friends are dead assails me once more.

It will be an even longer time before I can accept it.

**This was Sirius' nightmare in Azkaban, as I see it, of seeing Lily and James. I've set this in maybe the first year of his sentence. Like it? You know what to do. Dislike it? You know what to do, but I'd rather you didn't as I may have to cry, and anyway flamers are usually losers anyway. IF however there is an intelligent criticism, please feel free to make it. But you have to do it without using the following words in any form (INCLUDING synonyms) - suck, crap, rubbish, stupid, boring, blow, and any random swearwords. **


End file.
